Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters link it as the primary source for the 'multiplicative gameplay' idea and the chemistry engine behind BotW.
What it is
A 2017 GDC session in which Nintendo's Breath of the Wild team walks through how the game's convention-breaking systems were built. It covers the 'chemistry engine' of material interactions and shows the early 2D prototype footage.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2017 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Cites flgr · 2017-03 · on “The new legend of Zelda is a toy box of delights”
In their GDC talk ( [this video] ) one of the core concepts they present is "multiplicative gameplay", which sounds a lot like what NetHack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup aim for as well. It's a surprising amount of fun to have multiple ways to solve puzzles and try to come up with one that was or was not intended to solve it.
Cites BHSPitMonkey · 2017-03 · on “The new legend of Zelda is a toy box of delights”
Here's a direct link to the timestamp where they talk about this, and show off an internal 2D prototype of their "chemistry engine": [this video]
Cites Agentlien · 2017-03 · on “The new legend of Zelda is a toy box of delights”
Yes, they talk about it in the GDC talk[1] and that's what I was referring to: That I can see how even in such a simple prototype the fun seemed evident. [1] [this video]
Cites doomlaser · 2018-04 · on “Why I’m Using the Cerny Method of Game Development”
Last year at GDC, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta broke down the creation of the game in a full length session with video of the original top-down 2D prototype: [this video]
Cites iamwil · 2023-05 · on “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release”
Yes, it's rare, but they have. Game maker's toolkit has one on how they solved their open world problem for BotW: - [LINK] And at GDC, they talked about their Chemistry engine for BotW: - [this video] - [LINK] Game historian has some tidbits of how they made certain design decisions for their successful games Mario Kart: - [LINK] Super Mario World: - [LINK] Super Mario Bro 3: - [LINK] GMT, Snowman, and Extra credit does analysis of how Nintendo designs their Mario levels. - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] Generally, it follows the ramp up and down of the Hero's journey in storytelling. 1. Introduce a new mechanic in a safe area where it's impossible to die. 2. Increase the challenge wi
Cites iamwil · 2024-10 · on “Game Programming in Prolog”
The Breath of the Wild game design has a concept called the "Chemistry Engine". In that game engines usually have a physics engine to figure out how things interact in a motion sense. The chemistry engine figures out how materials interact in an alchemy sense. It's kinda like a rules-based engine to figure out how different things interact with different other things, so you get surprising interactions between everything in the world, like being able to light arrows on fire, because arrows are a "wood" material. The Youtube link is here: [this video] It seems like most rule-based stuff in games is just hand-coded, as it's relatively simple and doesn't need to be general. When I asked the author o